The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (Flavia de Luce, #6)

by Alan Bradley

This latest book to follow precocious mystery and chemistry fanatic Flavia de Luce picks up the action immediately after the story ends in the previous book, Speaking from Among the Bones. Now, there’s a new death to investigate, but it is almost a side story to the bigger tale: Harriet, Flavia’s long-lost mother, has been found and her body is being brought back home to Buckshaw. This introduces a number of new characters, as neighbors from the whole vicinity as well as relatives come to pay their respects.

Flavia gets to meet, very briefly, Winston Churchill, who asks her an odd question, and right after that, she witnesses another possible murder: a man who whispers a strange message to her falls under the train that brought her mother home. Flavia, naturally, wants to figure out what the message meant and who would have killed this man, whoever he was.

But she also has to come to terms with the death of her mother, as do her father and her older sisters. The ways Flavia decides to handle certain problems are definitely ideas only she could come up with, too.

This book veers away slightly from the formula used in the previous books and introduces some new plot directions, but anything I could say about those would be spoilers. So read and enjoy and judge for yourself.

Rated: Mild, for a half-dozen uses of mild language and one or two mild scenes of violence.

— Reviewed by Cathy Carmode Lim

Cathy Carmode Lim has been reviewing books for newspapers for about 20 years, two of which she was a book page editor. She founded Rated Reads in January 2008.

One Response to The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (Flavia de Luce, #6)

[…] de Luce’s adventures should find this latest in the series entertaining. In the previous book, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches, Alan Bradley added in a new plot element to what had previously been simply local murder […]